I missed the above - anyone got a recording?
The great American essayist, Susan Sontag, once said that we all carry two passports – one that allows us into the kingdom of the well and another, which we’re less inclined to use, that ushers us into the realm of the sick. This week’s edition of Words and Music is all about that kingdom of malady – from the famous musical sneeze in Kodaly’s Hary Janos suite to the balm of the Bach aria “Schlummert ein, ihr matten Augen”; or, if you prefer, from Harold Pinter’s description of electroconvulsive therapy in The Caretaker to John Evelyn’s eye-watering account of the seventeenth century’s way with bladder stones. Its not all so visceral though. Many indispositions begin in our minds…sometimes they are trivial as in Grieg’s vague feelings of homesickness and sometimes they are serious as in Malcolm Lowry’s grotesque and comical account of the hallucinations brought on by dipsomania.
Talking about illness can be part of a cure so maybe listening can affect a kind of healing too. The readers for this journey into the night-side of life are Rory Kinnear and Anna Maxwell Martin.
Producer: Zahid Warley
More details here
The show featured the following:
Author of text: Malcolm Lowry
Name of text: From Lunar Caustic
From book: From Lunar Caustic
Reader: Rory Kinnear
Dur: 01'59
One of the music tracks played was by Gil Scott Heron which has an ironic touch with regard to Malc's time in NY!
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment